Any friend of the Wallers is a friend of mine. Edmund Waller (1606-1687), whom Samuel Johnson describes as “too young to resist beauty, and probably too vain to think himself resistable,” is a modest, sober-minded poet not of the first or second rank, best remembered for that anthology war horse:

“Go, lovely Rose—Tell her that wastes her time and me,That now she knows,When I resemble her to thee,How sweet and fair she seems to be.”

More to contemporary taste is Thomas “Fats” Waller (1904-1943), composer of another roseate song, “Honeysuckle Rose,” introduced as a dance number in the 1929 revue Load of Coal. The lyrics are by Waller’s longtime collaborator Andy Razaf:

The continuity of lyrical content across three centuries, shared by an English parliamentarian and two black American showmen, is remarkable. But so is the swing, if I can apply such a quality to Edmund Waller’s little song. Listen to its closing couplet:

“How small a part of time they shareThat are so wondrous sweet and fair!”

Imagine Fats tickling those iambs. As the Rag King says: “…you are the music / While the music lasts.”